‘At a time when other studios were still adjusting their mikes to get the sound of frying eggs off the sound track, here was game little Jack Warner coming up with a cheap picture of superb technical accomplishment.’

The film depicts the life and times of Caesar Enrico Bandello, an Italian gangster modelled after Al Capone, or perhaps Salvatore Cardinella:

‘And what a performance Edward G. Robinson gives in the role, spitting out his lines like daggers and seeming never to blink his basilisk eyes.’

A lack of characterisation, typical of a primitive sound film, was in evidence, however –

‘The supporting characters are mere ciphers, ripe for toppling… and Rico himself is not explained except as a callous hoodlum with an urge to get to the top at whatever cost, a man who fails to understand that he too is not merely vulnerable but mortal.’

But the film remained…

‘…a riveting delineation of the distortion and evil that can possess men’s minds.’

 

LH noted the historical value of this film, along with the similar Scarface:

‘They mark two of the high spots of the gangster movie, a form which has never left our screens but was at its most dynamic in the early days of talkies, when the era of the real gangsters was only just over and their snarled gutter language, punctuated by the rattle of tommy guns, was the easiest and simplest form of speech to reproduce from those primitive sound tracks.’

The sound period was only three years old when Little Caesar was made: